Billionaires can obviously read a little. They name their companies after items from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and design cars inspired by cyberpunk novels. They’ve got to crack a book to do that. Mark Zuckerberg is great at coding so he obviously can read. Sam Altman is a prepper with a huge collection of guns and drugs and gas masks, and he’s got to be able to read all their instructions. I bet Peter Thiel, the billionaire who co-founded PayPal, mentored and funded Zuckerberg and J.D. Vance, and is the man behind the curtain in Silicon Valley, wakes up every morning and just devours financial news in between bouts of Christian apocrypha. They just don’t seem to understand what they read.
In books and essays, they are usually criticized for how juvenile they are—their love of science fiction implied proof of their immaturity. That assumption is not always wrong. Elon Musk sleeps with empty cans of Diet Coke and a prop gun from Deus Ex next to his pillow and likely pays people to make sure he’s top ranked in video games. He so badly misread The Matrix Lana Wachowski told him to fuck off and recently lamented that she “can’t sit in a room and explain the movie to every single person” who misinterprets it. Musk’s bad reading of science fiction is certainly, as Wachowski noted in the same interview, a method fascists use to co-opt and undermine messages, but that suggests a clever intention gives Musk an awful lot of credit. Especially as there’s ample evidence that he, and the more mature Thiel and Zuckerberg, and many of the other tech billionaires who funded the latest American presidency and run our world, have zero reading comprehension skills. Which would make them functionally illiterate.
It’s a crisis already in this country so it might be easy to miss that so many wealthy and powerful people cannot grasp books they read and shows and films they watch. In the United States, we are taught that wealth equals intelligence so all these billionaires with unfinished degrees must be very smart. Certainly they know marketing, and finance, and sometimes they even know engineering—Mark Zuckerberg was a great coder long before he was cutting his hair like Augustus, the Roman emperor, because he admired the man’s ambition and how he brought about “200 years of world peace.” Unfortunately, a gift with Java and C++ does not translate to reading comprehension, or Zuckerberg might have recognized that that peace extended only to the bounds of the Roman Empire because Augustus wasn’t a beloved leader but a military dictator. It seems Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard before he got to the humanities course that teaches you how to critically engage with texts.
Zuckerberg’s mentor, Peter Thiel, did graduate and got a law degree to boot. Unfortunately he also so fundamentally misread theology that he’s giving lectures outside the Vatican connecting the Pope and activist Greta Thunberg to the Antichrist. Patheos, the non-denominational religious publication, said it was “better to ignore” Thiel’s “twisting of scripture” while the Franciscan friar who serves as the Pope’s chief advisor on AI called Thiel a heretic and suggested that his role in the Big Tech oligarchy qualified him to be burned at the stake. Unlike the other Big Tech billionaires, Thiel does have a degree in philosophy, but maybe Stanford, his alma mater, just does multiple choice tests for all grading, because Thiel cannot seem to read anything without terrible misinterpretation.
He’s one of the founders of Palantir, the all-seeing surveillance and data-aggregating SaaS (software as a service) company that works with military and police forces across the globe. Thiel based the name of the company on the all-seeing crystal balls mentioned in The Lord Of The Rings. Thiel chose it because he’s a nerd and his vision of Palantir was similar to that of the elves polishing those balls back in the First Age of J.R.R.Tolkien’s extensive mythology. Yet in Tolkien’s text, the palantírs are easily corruptible and capable of profoundly dangerous misuse. They generally only lead to death and/or ruin for the people scrying. So to name your all-seeing tech company after it would be like naming your big shipping concern Titanic because you love big ships.
Thiel was also loosely involved in the creation of another Tolkien-themed military technology company: Anduril Industries, which was created by Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey and Palantir defector Trae Stephens because they felt there was a market for a tech-startup-like defense contractor. They named it after the broken sword that is reforged and Aragorn carries through most of the trilogy. On its face Anduril is the rare company whose name actually tracks well with the goals of the company—except that Tolkien was extremely anti-war and infused the whole series with that sentiment. To read his work is to come away exhausted by the ravages of war (and orcs), not be inspired to create a defense contractor. To miss that theme suggests a real failure to actually engage with and understand the text.
And that’s what we see from these billionaires again and again. Sam Altman and the other horsemen of the AI-pocalypse have repeatedly referenced Star Trek as an inspiration for the models they are training and the technology they are building. Yet, each Star Trek series seemed to have an episode a season about the follies of technology and the dangers of handing too much power to machines. Same with Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s massively influential silent film where a robot is disguised as a workers’ rights activist so the movement can be controlled by the rich. Or the entire oeuvre of Isaac Asimov, which amounts to “tech is cool but BE CAREFUL, DEPENDENCY KILLS.”
Science fiction as a genre formed partially out of a very real anxiety humans had about the rapid progress of technology. The writers were looking ahead to ponder the ethical and moral quagmires technology would engender. Their ruminations are not subtle, unless you are approaching those works with the most surface-level engagement. That’s what the tech billionaires are doing. They are reading these books and watching these films and TV shows, and even playing these games and then claiming they were inspired. But they didn’t actually understand what they read, and that has nothing to do with being juvenile or a nerd.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.